by Andrea Kitt
My mother’s parents were quite different, and I didn’t like them very much. Bumpa had been shell-shocked in the First World War and seemed harmless enough but not particularly approachable. He made jig-saw maps in a room outside, and smoked smelly cigarettes, and occasionally played the piano. Nanna was a white South-African, bossy and insensitive and concerned exclusively with practicalities. Often when I spoke to her I would be met with a strange silence that it took me a few moments to realize was building up to an enormous wheeze, at the end of which she would laugh out loud, at me, for saying whatever I had said. Once again I felt the adult world was mocking me.
Their home was impressively self-sufficient, from the loom on which she wove blankets and the clothes she knitted or crocheted, to the home-made strawberry jam, home-baked cakes, and garden vegetables bottled for use in the winter. You even had to wipe your bottom on newspaper, or else that horrible scratchy tracing paper stuff that was popular in those days.
The first time I went to stay at their house by myself, I was terribly homesick. Awful though it was, it would have all been over on the day my mother picked me up had it not been for the drama over my teddy-bear. Carmen had given Nanna a new teddy, with explicit instructions to give it to me at bedtime on the first night of my stay. She didn’t: she gave it to me much later, when I was particularly weepy. I told Carmen about this in the car on the way home, and she became seized with indignation and fury that her mother had let her down. It must have had more to do with times in her own past when this had happened than with the present situation, but now it all came out in a shock-wave of emotion that sent my inner world reeling. Not knowing how to express how I felt, as usual I simply began to cry, and for years afterwards I couldn’t think about it without tears coming into my eyes. She had portrayed such a sense of betrayal that it stuck in my throat as something truly dreadful, and it took a long time to realize that really it was no big deal.
Nanna had a sister in South Africa. I never met her, but she would send us odd things through the post. A fat package would arrive with buffalo stamps on it, and inside would be exotic seed pods, cracker novelties, perhaps a cheap ring, a tea card, a seashell... It all looked fascinating until I sorted it in detail, and discovered that there was at best perhaps one thing worth keeping amongst all the bits and pieces.
Other relatives included Shelley’s sister Lalage who was a missionary in Siam (now Thailand) and her family, and his other sister Jennifer who was schizophrenic, and my mother’s brothers and their families. Carmen chose for us not to see any of them very often, saying that we “Didn’t have much in common.” I didn’t mind too much, but I do feel now that it would be nice to have known them a bit better; and that whole attitude of ‘we’re better than them’ crept inside me and made me feel a little more distant from the world and the people in it.
5
Friends & Fairies
I didn’t have many friends in the village, and this was partly because I didn’t go to the village school, but also because of this attitude that our family was a cut above the common herd: more cultured, intelligent, enlightened in some way. It’s taken me years to get this out of my system, though one positive result is the on-going joyful surprise that comes from discovering more and more ‘ordinary’ people in the world that are interesting and loveable and in many ways just like me!
However, I did have two friends from very early on. Anne and Jacky Boucherat were sisters, and their French-speaking parents were friends with mine. Anne, being the eldest, tended to be in charge, except when she was laid up in bed, because she had brittle-bone disease and would quite often break a leg. The village didn’t have much traffic, so from the age of six or seven we were allowed to walk to each others’ houses and explore the surrounding countryside. We took our adventures very seriously. Anne formed us into a club called the ‘Marie Club’ because her second name was Marie. Naturally, she was the leader. We would keep a written record of our adventures and recount them reverently at club meetings, and sometimes she would get us to sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as a club anthem.
I remember one adventure called ‘Dead Sheep Bully-Bull’. It involved being chased across a field by some bullocks, scrambling under a barbed wire fence and coming across the disturbing carcass of a dead sheep. After that we struggled through the brambly undergrowth of the woods and found a large pond with an island in the middle, and of course we dreamed about making a raft and setting out and inhabiting it, but somehow we never did. Probably boys would have done better.
Another adventure happened one warm summer day when we took a picnic and wandered further from the village than we had ever been before. We walked for what seemed like miles, up and down across green, short-cropped meadows, and came to a grove of magical silver trees shimmering in the sunshine. Anne told us they were poplars. She was very knowledgeable about plants. I still remember her pointing out little blue speedwell flowers, shepherds-purse with its tiny purse-shaped seed cases, dead-nettles whose flowers we would pluck off and suck the nectar from, and the young nutty-tasting hawthorn leaves that were apparently named by a bird who called them ‘a-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’.
We sat on a daisy-strewn bank and ate our sandwiches and drank lemonade, then we walked a little further and found a hedge with a tunnel down the middle, all dark and gloomy and mysterious. I crept through, thrilled to have found a secret passage, planning to make a camp and thinking of the things I would bring here from home. Then when I backed out Jacky crept in, being younger than me but more adventurous than Anne. A couple of minutes later she came out screaming: two big eyes had come looming towards her from the other end of the tunnel! It turned out to be a curious cow.
It was such fun to explore. Somehow we never quite had an overview of the countryside and would tend to forget places after a while, so life was full of surprises: new footpaths, new treasures: interesting stones, butterflies, frogs, flowers; hideaways, climbable trees, tumbledown sheds. There were some places closer to home that we visited regularly, such as the hollow oak and the thistle forest in the field opposite their house, in which the thistles were taller than we were. The churchyard we visited quite often too, with the grave of Jack-o-Legs the giant who had thrown a boulder all the way from Baldock and been buried where it landed.
Our favourite place we christened ‘Harvest’. It was an old wooden trailer in a field just outside the village, where there was also a huge block of straw bales that we would sometimes climb up and jump from. ‘Harvest’ was our pirate ship. In summer the surrounding grass would be deep as the sea and full of dangerous waves. We would stride about the deck, issuing commands, sighting land, watching out for the weather, steering by means of the iron thing that connected the trailer to a tractor. Sometimes we would climb down into the hold for provisions; sometimes we would throw pink sugar shrimps into the sea and fish them out for lunch.
Every year there was an ‘Autumn Feast.’ We hung candles in jam-jars from the apple and plum trees in Long House garden, decorated the area with rose-hips and hawthorn berries, and tried to make food for the occasion, though baked potatoes and pieces of cake supplied by the parents were far more edible. One year we made elderberry wine; it went mouldy, but we put it in glasses anyway, because of the nice red colour. We even made a pie out of rabbit bran decorated with rabbit pobbles – also definitely just for show! We would sing ‘Plough the Fields and Scatter’ and ‘Jerusalem’ which Anne had learnt at Sunday School. And we talked about adventures past and adventures planned.
Then one day our parents had a quarrel. I’m not sure what it was about, but we were terribly upset about it. Being the 60s, Anne suggested a protest, so we made banners and marched about in one house and then the other, and even along the road in between, chanting “No Quarrel!” I think they sort-of made up after a few weeks, but things remained a little frosty, and not long after that the Boucherats moved to Letchworth and I saw much less of them.
So there were real people,
and there were less real people, but the distinction between the two was not always clear. I definitely believed in fairies. It wasn’t that I had seen any as such, though I did have some mysterious experiences of that nature later on; it was more that I had a strong faith in the fact that things were not all as they seemed and that anything was possible; and the characters in my dreams and in books and in my imagination, as well as the people, animals, dolls and objects around me, were all important members of my world.
I remember two occasions when I believed I had found a fellow believer, and was sadly disillusioned. The first person was my father. I can’t remember now why I thought I should be given a wish: perhaps I had found a four-leafed clover, or the end of a rainbow. One way or the other, I confided in him what had happened and he agreed that it was an occasion when a wish should be granted. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him what I would like more than anything was raspberry ice-cream in a cone. A little while later he presented me with a teaspoon of raspberry jam, obviously from the cupboard. I didn’t say anything, but I thought about it for some time and felt deeply betrayed.
The second time I thought I had found an ally it was my friend at school, Judy Kersch. She told me that she believed in fairies too, and we got excited and made plans to set out from our respective houses early in the morning when the fairies were still abroad. Naturally I took this very seriously, though I was still only four. That afternoon my mother was baking biscuits, and I asked her if I could put some aside for the fairies. She obviously didn’t believe me, but she gave me a few in a bag and I tucked them in my coat pocket. Then at five o’clock the next morning I crept out of the house and made my way out of the village, to the place where Judy and I had arranged to meet. Of course it wasn’t really practical, because she lived in Letchworth four miles away, but at least I made the effort! When my parents woke up they were horrified to find me missing; they leapt into the car and drove everywhere they could think of, finally finding me a surprisingly long way from home.
By this time I was actually quite relieved to be picked up, but it was what happened afterwards that hurt. Judy, the traitor, denied all knowledge of any plans at all; and I overheard my mother time and again telling the story to the other mothers and laughing in a way that made me feel small and stupid and ridiculed, though I’m sure that wasn’t her intention.
My confidence was so low that one extra prod and I would feel myself trying to squeeze even further into my already cramped shell. I had a horror of anyone bossy. I remember learning the word ‘authoritarian’ when I was a bit older, and enjoying the satisfaction of being able to label this thing that I feared. Carmen often employed someone to help clean the house, and I’m not sure if it was because of these women or the cleaners at school, but I developed a fear of their self-righteous, businesslike manner and had a recurrent dream of one such lady who would come to the door dropping ugly moles on the doormat, march in and accuse me mercilessly of some misdemeanour, but I never knew what it was. The dream would go on and on and she would keep telling me that I did know what it was and I would keep racking my brains, until it got so unbearable and so threatening that I woke up with my heart racing.
Goblin dreams ran along similar lines except that with goblins there were lots of them, approaching down a tunnel, endlessly mocking me: “You know what you did wrong!... Its her: she did it!” I felt so terribly guilty and accused, but could never, ever figure out what it was I had done.
6
Christmas & the Seaside
However, from day to day and left to myself, the characters in my inner world were my friends and we got on very well. Father Christmas was definitely a friend, and was very generous. A typical stocking would contain a pink sugar mouse, a soap that looked and smelt like a lemon, chocolate pennies, a packet of plasticine, crayons, a tiny magnetic ladybird, a book to read and another to draw in, a puzzle of some sort, plastic farmyard animals, one of those things on which you could endlessly write and then erase, a box of colourful Bengal matches, a tube of bath oils like great green and red marbles, chalky little bath cubes, a small spinning top, a thing that uncurled as you blew it and made a loud noise, a pair of pretty socks, a tangerine in the toe... So many treasures!
Oh that thrilling feeling, waking in the half-light and seeing the great bulging stocking at the end of the bed, always with someone peeping out of the top, a little rabbit or a bear, and always with a big shiny balloon attached to it. Once it was light I would drag it through to my parents’ bedroom and sit in their bed, and while they drank mugs of tea I covered the bed with wrapping paper.
Carmen made the house look very beautiful. The tree fitted nicely into the bay window, decorated with glass balls that ranged from tiny bead-sized ones at the top to great fruit-sized ones at the bottom; and silver tinsel, and red spiral candles in little tin holders that pegged onto the branches. When all the candles were alight it was truly magical, and the songs about Holy Night and the Deep Midwinter just made it more so.
Granny had sent a hamper in advance, filled with gorgeous treats. There was a large wooden tray of crystallized apricots such as I have never found since, really succulent and plump. Then there was a wooden box of raspberry jelly sweets, some Turkish Delight, chestnuts, cheeses and shortbread, all nestled in curly wood shavings. On Christmas Day Hugh and Marjory would come laden with gifts, the dining table would be laid with a red cloth and we would eat nutroast with roast potatoes and parsnips and other vegetables, followed by Christmas pudding and mince-pies. In the middle of the table golden angels rang tiny bells as they circled round and round above four candles.
Easter was special too, with the thrill of great big golden eggs and little ones hidden in the garden, and soft colourful Chinese birds that Carmen said had laid the eggs. Often at Easter we were in Cornwall, sharing a big house called ‘Atlanta’ with one or two other families that my parents knew from Art School. I loved that place. I have always loved the ocean, and the north coast of Cornwall stirred my soul with its wildness.
The first song I remember composing was something I sang to myself as I walked along the Cornish cliffs gazing out to sea. It was to the tune of ‘Lara’s song’ in ‘Dr Zchivago’, which was a popular film at the time, and the words went: “My love is there, over the horizon’s haze, my love is there, sheltered by lapping waves. I know, so well that he knows, he knows, so well that our love is true! I know not his face nor his hands, but see his footprints in the sands, name nor nature, position nor stature, but he is there... heaven knows where!” True to my romantic spirit and my romantic heritage, I would gaze out to sea and dream of my future lover, and the depth of the sea would reflect the depth of my longing, and the power of the waves would reflect the passion in my heart that was waiting for him. And all anyone saw was a rather quiet little girl.
However, I wasn’t always on my own; sometimes a whole group of us went walking or sometimes, most memorably, it would be just me and my father. Shelley helped me to appreciate nature, particularly the more masculine side of it. Often when I strode along with him, cheerfully defying the wind or rain, he would point out the shapes of the rocks and the landscape. I am especially reminded of him when I see those stacks or arches that protrude from the sand or the seabed, for they were similar to the shapes that he carved and moulded at home, and would always inspire his admiration.
All that separated ‘Atlanta’ from the Atlantic Ocean was a stretch of grass, which after a storm would be covered in trembling piles of spume, the foam created by the waves battering on the rocks. The beach directly in front of the house was rocky, with a sewage pipe leading far out into the sea and covered in concrete, which made an easy way to reach the farther rock pools. I would spend hours on end gazing in the pools and searching for treasures in the little areas of coarse sand in between.
There were hundreds of limpets, mainly large, yellow and sea-worn, but sometimes there would be a small spiky one or an extra large one with a deeply coloured centre that would catch my
eye and be added to my collection, along with the tiny kingfisher limpet with its fine blue stripes. I also found bright yellow, green and brown periwinkles, which I made into necklaces. And I searched for the rarer shells: a good specimen of the lovely pink top shell with its point intact, or the dear little cowries like fingertips hiding amongst the broken bits. Even the common mussels could sometimes be pretty, and then there were all sorts of shapes and colours of gleaming mother-of-pearl oysters, and cockles, and delicate little pink shells like ears, and spiral shells and slipper-shaped shells.
The pools were beautiful too, with coloured weeds and crabs and interesting things to fish out and put in a bucket; though there was one pool that holds a darker memory. It was deep and wide, and someone had hewn it out so it was even deeper and wider, and added some iron steps, so that when the tide was out it made a seawater swimming pool. My father’s friend Tim was there bathing with us one day, and he miscalculated and dove in straight onto a rocky ledge. He came up with blood pouring from his head and had to be taken to hospital, where he was given stitches; and he soon recovered. The strange thing was that a few years later, when staying at my parents’ cottage in Wales, he was walking past the roof when a slate blew off and gave him another gash in the head... But that’s his story, and only he knows of its significance!